Films produced in Europe made up 28 per cent of films broadcast by a sample of TV channels during the 2015 – 2016 season. This sample contains a total of 131 TV channels from 18 different EU member countries. These findings come from a new report published by the European Audiovisual Observatory, part of the Council of Europe: Films on TV: Origin, age and circulation. The Strasbourg-based Observatory drafted this free report for the DG Connect of the European Commission.

The report reveals that public channels tend to broadcast more European films than their private counterparts. Taking a full day on public television, European films accounted for 44 per cent of all films broadcast. This figure falls to 24 per cent for the private TV channels in the sample. Taking into account the prime time slot, these figures fall to 39 per cent and 19 per cent respectively.

Of the 15 504 film titles broadcast during the 2015 – 2016 season, 47 per cent were produced in Europe and 47% in the US with the rest of the world making up 6 per cent. However a difference appears when one considers that European films were broadcast in 1.4 countries in the same year, while US films were broadcast in 3.1 countries in the year studied. The circulation difference explains why European films represented 47 per cent of single film titles broadcast while accounting for only 28 per cent of cumulated films broadcast.

Several countries had a strong export ratio for their films, meaning that a significant proportion of the broadcasts occurred in another country of the sample: the majority of the broadcasts of films produced in Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany and the UK happened outside the country of production.

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